What is This? Setting up virtual environments can be essential to troubleshooting hardware and software problems. Unfortunately, if your software relies on SMART data to function properly, you’re out of luck, since virtual disks do not have SMART functionality. Since I was attempting to setup a hardware configuration in a virtual environment and the software…

Hot on the heels of Nvidia’s new GTX 780, the new top-of-the-line for consumer video cards, Nvidia did not spare 24 hours before releasing version 319.23 of their Linux driver. What’s new in this release? Well, a whole lot of everything, including support for the GTX 780 itself! Here is a brief overview of the…

All old things must come to an end If there is one thing we can all count on in the open source blogosphere, it’s Linus Torvalds no bullshit approach to communicating with the world. That same no bullshit approach was not absent today when Linus moved to officially axe “ancient 386 support” from Linux. Ancient?…

Linux 3.6 has been officially released, and from most angles it appears to be a lack-luster one, bringing only what Linus calls “solid progress”. Of course like any major kernel release, Kernel 3.6 comes with a bevy of new drivers, optimizations and more. But one features stands out above all the rest, and it’s really…

If you haven’t heard, Linux Mint is up to something great. With that greatness, they verified quite confidently that the ‘Mate’ project is actually up and running and packages are being installed and working! For those of you who don’t know, Mate is a project that offers the traditional Gnome 2.x desktop to modern machines.…

So I am looking for a cloud provider. The search is serious and there is a lot more vetting to be done before making a decision. I happened across Rackspace today after reading this article, detailing the top 10 cloud providers of 2011. Below is the conversation that I had with sales support today. This could have…

Major news from Canonical today. The makers of Ubuntu have just made a big promise to it’s future users. The forthcoming LTS (Long-Term-Support) edition of it’s supremely successful Linux distribution with extend support to 5 years, up from 3 years on the desktop. Canonical had previously been supporting the Server edition for 5 years. Could…